After just over a year of behind the scenes transition, Bing has officially begun powering Yahoo’s natural and paid search results. Similar to combining the strengths of Ironman and Aquaman (the underdogs of superheroes), Yahoo and Bing (the underdogs of search) have combined their strengths to create a search engine super-power.

Since August 24, 2010 Yahoo’s web, image and video search results on both desktop and mobile devices have been powered by Bing. Although these results are currently only available in the US and Canada, world domination is soon to come. Together Yahoo and Bing now hold almost 30% the search market share. With Google’s market share dropping monthly, this search alliance has the power to give Google some stiff competition.

What does Bing bring to the Alliance?

All web, image and video search results in Bing and Yahoo

All pay per click ads in Bing and Yahoo

Provides support and marketing to search advertisers who are not managed by an account team

What does Yahoo bring to the Alliance?

Continues to deliver the “Yahoo! search experience” to users by integrating their own content, shortcuts and tools into Yahoo search results

Yahoo is now the exclusive worldwide sales force for all high-volume search advertisers

Maintaining a User’s Search Experience

As a Yahoo user you will now see faster, more useful and personally relevant search results and advertising. Yahoo’s home screen and search result pages continue to look the same as they always have, but the ranking order of the results are 100% Bing’s. And don’t worry, Yahoo’s email, instant messaging, news, finance, etc will remain unaffected by the merger.

Go ahead try it out. All you have to do is a search on Yahoo and you’ll see the “Powered by Bing” message at the bottom of your search results.

Optimizing for the Search Alliance

Luckily for site owners, the transition is just as simple as it is for users. If your site has been properly optimized for natural search, there is not much you will need to do to optimize for the Yahoo / Bing search alliance. In fact, things just got easier. As a site owner, you should have been devoting your time between Yahoo and Bing. But now your time needs to only be focused towards Bing as it is responsible for Yahoo’s search results.

If you haven’t already done so, you should start familiarizing yourself with Bing Webmaster Central. You’ll want to use Bing’s Webmaster toolset to track your site separately from Google as Bing could now contribute as much as one-third of natural search traffic to your site.

Paid Search Transitions

The biggest change that the Yahoo / Bing search alliance brings to site owners are within paid search. If you currently manage separate Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and adCenter accounts, you’ll want to pay attention.

All YSM advertisers will be migrated over to adCenter by October 15, 2010. To be fully prepared for the migration, you should begin making adjustments now. While it is possible to repurpose your YSM account, it’s easier to start in adCenter with a clean slate. The adCenter keyword system more closely resembles that of AdWords than it does YSM and adCenter’s geo-targeting is quite different than YSM’s as well. While creating new accounts from scratch sounds daunting, it will really provide you with the most success.

Yahoo is NOT Dead

With the search super-force well underway, faithful Yahoo users can breathe a sigh of relief – Yahoo is not dead. Yahoo continues to drive innovation and value into their users experiences. They still maintain the technology and infrastructure to crawl, index and rank sites and are still a search engine. With Bing now powering Yahoo’s search results Yahoo can get back to what they do best, making you say “Wow!” Some of the biggest and best brains in the industry are hard at work at Yahoo developing some incredible search related products and creating a rich, immersive experience for all Yahoo users.

If you need any help, or have any questions while transitioning from Yahoo to Bing feel free to contact OpenVision today. Our expert team of search engine professionals has the skills and knowledge it takes for your site to succeed. Call us today at 843.785.9911 ext 224 or fill out our quick contact form.